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#TipTuesday: Change your Layer Style

It’s the season of change. Green leaves are changing to a menagerie of colors, pumpkins are changing to jack-o-lanterns, and your layers are changing to…. well, that’s up to you. The latest update to your GIS software allows you to change much of how your layers look – including styling them based off of a feature’s attributes!

What you see above is our demo site’s usual tree layer. What we’re going to show you in this post is how to change the icon style based off of tree diameter instead of species type. To change the tree’s symbols, we first click on the arrow to the right of the layer list’s “Trees” section. This will give you a menu where you can click “Turn on/off layer visualizations” to start customizing your layer.

Change the visualization to “Custom Layer Style” and choose “Attribute” for symbology type. This will allow you to select an attribute to use for differentiation. Most of the defaults should work fine, though play around with the settings to find out what works best for you. I changed the colors to make patterns stand out in the resulting map.

Clicking “Apply” now shows the trees re-symbolized to display small diameter trees as red, large diameter trees as green, and others as a gradient in-between the two.

You can use attribute symbolization to find patterns, problems, inconsistencies, and more in your GIS. It’s a powerful tool, and we look forward to hearing how you use it. Give it a try on pipes to see themed size maps, or on structure/pipe install dates to see a map themed on your infrastructure age. The possibilities are endless!